Okay, we're going to get started. If you could, if you're going to ask questions or talk, if you could, I'm already shouting. And so it's where, if you're spaced out quite a bit, you're going to have to speak up. We are recording and people are wanting to hear. So someone remind me to repeat questions because I never do. So if you were at the new members luncheon, you saw that. Okay, so we are, before we pray, just to let you know how this is going to go. It's scheduled for six to eight weeks. This is a title called Kingdom Confusion, and it's primarily about Christianity and culture. Now, that sounds like something that should only take a week, but you are incorrect if you believe that. And while politics will certainly be a part of it, it will by no means be the only subject that we cover. So the way it's going to work out is this week, I'm just kind of introducing terms and what we're going to be talking about, and then kind of giving a few definitions to move forward with, particularly with culture and this idea of kingdom. and then giving a few specific scriptures that this particular doctrine is built on, which is called the Two Kingdom Doctrine, and then how that is a framework that I'm going to express in how you view life. Now, some of us have been Christians for quite some time, and you might be like, well, I already know how to live life. What this is is something that primarily is something I've been wanting to talk about for years and years for anyone that would listen. And after this last year, particularly you could even say the last decade of politics individually in the country and how evangelicalism has both reacted and been represented and behaved, the midst of a cultural common a common engagement something not special in terms of what the church is but common to all people has been less than exciting you can you know Evangelicalism, and this is a completely different subject, is a term that, if you've talked to me before about it, is something that I almost wish didn't exist anymore. And the reason is because it doesn't mean anything anymore. When the MyPillow guy is on TV saying that God said Trump is supposed to serve two terms, but God didn't get his way, And when he's told, what is the news reporter saying, evangelicals, like the MyPillow guy, That's what evangelicalism is. And so everyone gets kind of thrown in this pot is like, this is how, and it's a picture into how evangelicalism in America, at least, is viewed by broader culture. Not as something that is a part of it, but also outside of it in a different way, but is right in the mix of all the ugly. So what I want us to do is to, in the end of the study, you might disagree with several aspects of what I'm going to teach, and I'm okay with that. But what I do want to throw out there is having a consistent theological framework with how you interact with all of culture. And I think that Two Kingdom view is what this is. And it's been, it's biblical, it's been used throughout the history of the church by some of my personal heroes of the faith. And as I said, we will be talking particularly after this week, and then next week we'll be talking about Adam, the first Adam and the second Adam. And then we'll be talking about moving forward from there, specifics about the church. and we'll talk about spish, which is one kingdom, and then specifics about the common kingdom, that is everything else in culture outside of the church, and then we're gonna take each week to talk about, in particular, three issues, and it could go on forever, but I wanna make it as short as possible to not draw it out too long, but we're gonna talk about, in particular, education, work, and politics. And if I save politics for last, they'll be like, no, do it first. So we'll probably do that first. Or maybe you're just done with politics. By the way, does everybody know who the MyPillow guy is? I didn't know that was real. I got one of his pillows. So how I became aware of it is that my son Joshua at school, yesterday, that wasn't part of the manuscript for today, the MyPillow thing. Joshua came home, and we're throwing the ball. By the way, if I stand up and I look really weird, I threw my back out playing catch with my kids, which shows how old I am now, which is just one of those really sad things. Anyway, I was throwing the ball with Josh yesterday, and he's like, Dad, it's really sad about what happened with the election. And I was like, no, maybe. We don't know yet. There's things I'm unhappy about, but you never know what God has in store. He goes, yeah, but a lot of, like, really good prophets were saying that President Trump was, God wanted him to serve two terms. And I was like, pssh. And it's one of those moments like, what's the kid's name? Who are his parents? What's his phone number? But I was like, okay, sit down, say that again. And he told me and he told his friend's name. I was like, buddy, number one, I want you to repeat a line after me. If someone tells you a prophet said, you say, no, they didn't. Because there are no more prophets. And then got to talk to him about the beauty of cessationism. And then just seeing the puzzle, looking at it, but then he came home today. He said, dad, I got to tell, and he inserted his friend's name. He was talking about it again. And I was like, hey, you know what? Isn't pro, oh, no, what did he say? I was really proud of him for the snark and the way he put it together. So-and-so told me something about, was sad about the prophet not getting, you know, it didn't happen. And I said, hey, you know who's not a prophet? Who? Someone who says they told a prophecy and it doesn't come true. And I was like, nice. I'm gonna buy you a car when you're 16. No, I'm gonna buy you a bike for your birthday. Anyway. And then I looked online and I saw this MyPillow guy, and I don't even know what's going on, but evidently that was several aspects. Okay, let's pray and then get into defining kind of the goal of this. I've already kind of laid out, but also defining what the framework is, what Two Kingdom doctrine is, and some definitions, particularly a definition that we're gonna use for culture. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this night. We thank you for the beauty of your word. uniqueness of the church, and God, may we ever cling to the truths you've given us in your word and through the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Now, Lord, I pray you guide us in our study. Guide us in a discussion that glorifies you and brings to understanding in our hearts and minds, God, how you are always sovereign, how your grace is ever overflowing, And Lord, also that the church has distinction from the rest of the culture around us, and that means there's implications in the way we live and think and work and do things that other people do around us who are not a part of the church. Lord, glorify, may you be glorified in our midst, and may the church be edified in Christ's name, amen. Okay, who knows? or has heard, I should say, of a two kingdom view or two kingdom theology. Or maybe it's better to raise your hand if you've never heard of that. Yes, I'm true. OK. Up until the fourth, late fourth century, mid fourth century, the church found itself, in the first three centuries of the church, found itself in the midst of a hostile culture. What kind of culture was the church in for the first 300 years? What dominated thought and life and the way things worked? Was it a Christo-centric view of life? Was it even what we call today like Judeo-Christian? No, they were in Rome. It was Greco-Roman. It was polytheistic. There was multiple different ways of thinking in life that were antithetical to a Christian in the way that they were called to live. And yet, because the the culture was utterly hostile towards them, there was a very clear line of distinction between, here is this kingdom here, or this city, as Augustine would later call it, and something utterly different in the church. And so, when we're thinking about that, and you move forward throughout church history, you have something that happens when the ruler Constantine becomes emperor. Does anyone, everyone know who Constantine is and what happened? How does anyone want to share the story of what they know? What's the deal with Constantine and the church? Why are those tied together? His mother was a believer. He went into battle, thought he saw, said he saw a vision of a cross. He was victorious. He was victorious and became emperor. He made Christianity the official religion of Rome. about 323, something like that. After that, then now Christianity, which was always, even though there was large Christian populations, but throughout those first three centuries, they were heavily persecuted or left alone or ignored or heavily persecuted, dependent on how bad of a mood or what insane emperor was on the throne at that time. But then after that, Christianity became tied inexorably to the culture. They were indistinguishable because when it became the Roman, by fiat, it was the official religion. Pagans all over Rome became verbally Christians because you got tax breaks, you got, your business got, better business and it became popular to do. And so in the midst of that, you have Christians who are from the Germanic tribes, the Visigoths and the other Goths that come and they are laying siege to Rome and they are Aryan Christians. Arius was a pagan who was a pagan. He was a false teacher whose false teaching was was early in the church, where he I'm sorry, earlier in that century, where he was saying that Christ was less than the father. It was where you get the Council of Nicaea and all those things happen. Emperor Constantine was a part of that council. Anyway, the Aryan Aryanism, though, went to these different tribes. And as these alleged Christians are laying siege to Rome, which the shout was, we're Christians, too. A man named Augustine is writing a work called City of God, and what he writes about is kind of the decay of Rome being nothing compared kind of to the decay of the Church, because although people would blame Christianizing Rome for the fall of Rome and that kind of thing, the reality was, in Augustine's mind, that what had happened is that we had lost sight that there was what he would call City of God. The Church was a resident of the City of God, not the City of Man. And we were supposed to be about the city of God. And so later on, that view would be used all throughout and then go all the way up to the time of the Reformation. And it would become kind of something along the lines where we're starting now, which is called the two kingdom view. I've rambled a bit about the history, but so let me tell you where it comes from. When you look at or let me define culture first, that's probably what I should do. So culture, someone throw out a, when someone says culture, throw out something that you think. When someone, ask anything about culture. My father, when I was growing up, told me I needed to go more plays because that was culture. I was like, that sounds boring. Music. Music. Education. Education. Food. Food. Anyone else? Here's the definition. I didn't really get time after that. Anyone else? The definition I'm using is going to go as the following. Culture refers to all various human activities and their products as well as the way in which we interpret them and the language we use to describe them. Interpretation and language as well as the products themselves are crucial parts of culture because the same product can serve very different functions in different contexts. In this broad sense of culture, practically everything we do is cultural. Whether activities of high culture, or popular culture, or mundane tasks like brushing our teeth, not only nation-states, but also neighborhoods, universities, athletic leagues, families, churches, and all sorts of other things have their own cultures, which are often overlapping. Culture can't be used in an overly precise or technical way. We're going to use it to primarily refer to a broad range of activities, scientific, artistic, economic, in which human beings engage in. Christian culture is something that you've probably heard before, that term. It just refers to the variety of questions that emerge when we consider how Christians in the church are to relate to these broad activities of human culture and how Christian faith affects our interpretation of them. Let me give you an example. You use brush in your teeth. This last election cycle, if you went to vote, Or if you went and engaged someone in a conversation, probably more than likely on Facebook or something like that. How often have you stopped? Do you find yourself innately stopping and not asking the question, what would Jesus do? But asking questions that come from this foundation that you have of being a Christian, and having the Holy Spirit and having a framework from the scriptures of how you're supposed to interact and pursue all aspects. Anyone ever think like that? When you have a conversation with somebody in the store and they say something foul or lewd, is there an immediate, at least inwardly, because maybe you just met them, how do I move forward with this? That's engaging in culture. But what is the contrast there? Say to the person you met in the store who says something lewd to you because that's normal. What's immediately made evident? The way they think, the way they speak is different from... You guys are chatty tonight. from how you do it, there's a reason you're recoiling internally. And that's because what dwells in you internally. And so as we think of all of these different things we do in culture, the way that we interact with them and interpret them is based on this idea of living in two kingdoms. And so here comes the next definition. yes economic and then after that just anything that humans engage in when you think of covenants in the Old Testament which ones do you think of most often the Mosaic Covenant Abrahamic Covenant Oh man, I didn't think it would come that fast. Yes, Noah's. That's the one I was looking for. So when we think of these, the reason I say that doesn't get used that often, or I didn't think it would be, is that we think of things like the Abrahamic covenant, Mosaic covenant, Davidic covenant, we think of those and what do those all particularly have in common? Who is it set on? Abraham is of what line? Is he of the line? Okay, so going even further Genesis 3 crush the head of the snake from that time forward looking for the one who is going to come and redeem all things and That's the line when the Abrahamic Covenant is made is to special people to a special purpose with the special Messiah in mind And Mosaic is dealing with those people from who Messiah is going to come. And the Davidic is dealing with those special people with who Messiah will come and whose line he will be born and town it will be in. And yet the noadic covenant has to do with who? Everybody. So when we're looking at the covenant that Abraham makes, we're looking at what God is saying to all of mankind. And so that's where you get this idea of two kingdoms, the Abrahamic covenant, which represents God's special covenant with people that go from Abraham to Isaac, to David, to Messiah, to the church. Like it's this specific messianic line that continues for a special people. And then you have the covenant with Noah, which anyone want to give me the footnotes of what that's about? What does he when he tells when he gives a covenant with no one he gets out of arc What does he tell him it like like anything anything up from it? Never destroy the earth by flood again, what else? The idea of government, the idea of as we move forward and repopulate the earth, man made in God's image is unique because he's made in God's image. If you take that life and you murder that, then you have forfeit your own life because of how you have viewed God's gift to man. What else? No one's vegan anymore? Sorry, I threw that out. Not just the green food, but what's the interesting part of that? The animals and what will all the animals do now? Flee in fear of you, the reason is obviously because they've been in a boat with them for quite some time. What else? Cultural mandate of be fruitful and multiply. Increase on the earth and multiply in it. But this is a general covenant. Why? Because who are the people that are receiving it? The three sons. Anyone remember their names? Ham, Shem, and Japheth. And they represent who? Everyone. Everyone is going to come from them. They're their descendants. And so this covenant with Abraham represents this common kingdom, the kingdom, this is one of the kingdoms versus this common kingdom is something that we share with everyone. It's cultural and it's meaning that all these things apply to everyone. And one of the mistakes that we make probably is that when we think about the world sometimes, Christians, we think about it in almost a dualistic manner. Like when you think about culture, you think about the world, what's the word we use to describe it? It's not sacred, it's secular. It's secular and then a lot of times we treat it as if the sacred things are God's things and the secular things are whose things? The devil's, but that's wrong. Because God owns it all. God created it all. And God has in mind that when Christ returns, all that's going to be recreated. New heavens, new earth. But it's all still God, even though it's completely affected and broken by sin, it's still God's. And so when we think of the common, or what we often call secular, My first challenge would be investigate whether you're looking at it in what is a non-biblical view, which is a dualistic view. We have the sacred and the secular, and you have to stay away from that, and you have to engage only in this. That's what the Essenes did. That's what a lot of monasticism was in the Middle Ages, where escape from everything and go and hide and read and write and stay away from culture and stay away from all of that because we're sacred. But what happens if the church is never engaging the world around them? If we all decide to go home tonight and make a pact to never talk to anybody who isn't a part of this church and has been vetted and is probably Christian, what kind of church are we? So we're no longer a church. Yeah, the stark truth is, is that That becomes the sin that, well, let me not say it that way. That's too strong. That becomes a church that is not understanding its purpose. We should defund our missionaries and get them back here because they're surrounded by unbelievers, and Sioux Lookout, and Condern, and Nice, and St. Paul France, and Romania, like because all that matters is that we stick together, but that isn't anywhere described in the New Testament. And it has become, and just like Augustine's time, when the church and the state got real comfortable with each other and kind of intermingled, and the church has a lot of influence and culture, kind of like we have today, the last hundred years or so of Christianity in the United States, you see more and more how the church is really comfortable in the common kingdom, but acting like the common kingdom is God's kingdom. Anyone follow? Because when we say, hey, this is how the church is supposed to live, you unbelievers better live the same way. Now, don't mishear me. We are supposed to say, killing babies is bad. We are supposed to say murder is bad, kidnapping is bad, slavery is bad, but what we can't do is demand that the culture, the common culture, do what only the kingdom of God is called to do. Does that make sense? And so I'm trying to lay out what the common kingdom is. Questions? Yeah, Alexi. No, I'm saying the church still the church still like you're engaging someone and someone says That they enjoy some criminal pursuit or some unethical pursuit whether it be adultery or anything like that and you say well, that's That's sinful. God calls that sin and they may, well, I don't believe in God. Well, it doesn't matter that you don't believe in God. He believes in you and you're gonna have to answer to him. And so, and then, and then you can share the gospel with them. And that, that's what I mean by that versus Christianity should never be in power of government to where it can mandate people's lives, which has happened. Some of my heroes were all for it, like John Calvin. Well, there's obviously a balance there, because I would assume you agree we can mandate you don't outright kill people, so where do you draw the line? Well, that draws a line with what common government is. And so government, that's the thing with the Noahic Covenant. It's laying out rules for all of humankind that murder is bad. That's why universally you see all throughout the world, all throughout human history, most civilizations have held murder as being wrong. even though they're okay with murdering certain people, but their citizenship, it's the idea that taking a life is wrong. And so what I'm saying is we still call that sin, but we don't have the power or should pursue, the church shouldn't be concerned more with this common kingdom than it is with this other kingdom that only the church is a part of. which it's confusing right now because I have to go, oh, I want to go over each thing, but. So did you just take us back to, um, what's his name? Constantine. Constantine. Is that what you just took us back to? Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of. So we cannot mandate Christian. Now if you're, now this is where it would get interesting though. Like say you are a Christian judge or Something like that. How do you, how do you, are you able to make decisions? Do you have the ability to say, say you're a judge in Texas and you're trying a case, do you have the ability to say, well, because I'm a Christian, I'm going to make this verdict, even if it's countered to some existing law? You can't. You have to, to the best of your ability, uphold the ideals of God's kingdom while still operating in culture of the common kingdom by the boundaries that you are bound by. Now you could say, if it was something unethical, a judge has the ability to recuse themselves in Texas, in some states, in most states. And so that's where you have, you know, the ability to do something like that. But a person couldn't just say, well, I'm changing the law because laws aren't made that way. And so they're still bound to the laws of the common kingdom they're in, even though they know this other kingdom they're a part of is higher and better and superior in all ways. But there's still, we still have to operate with which we are. Yeah, Paul. So, it seems as though there's a bit of a blurring of the lines, because you have God's kingdom, and it's all God's, and he's mandated, do not murder, just taking that as an example. Yet, we hold that you don't murder babies. And so, though that's not law in the land, we as Christians are vehement. Sure. And want to see laws changed. Yep. That's the hill, right? That's right on there. Um, albeit it's not the law of the land. So when someone walks in, we don't tackle them to the ground and prevent them from going into the abortion clinic, though. Right. We probably would prefer to do that. Um, so it seems like it's cut and dry, but that's where you see Christians or we in this church pray fervently against that, want to see that change, but don't bomb a... Sure, that's a perfect example. You're weaving multiple streams of the two in there, but the reality is you're never leaving either of them. And that's the main point of talking about this is everyone around you who is in unbelief is the inhabitant of the common kingdom. And that's it. The church are inhabitants of the kingdom of God and the common kingdom at all times. And when Christ returns, all of this is going to disappear immediately. And then only this remains. And so as we are living in between two worlds, you have that really hard example of abortion. It's awful. It's tens of millions, hundreds of millions of babies murdered. What can we do about it? We know it's against God's law, but what we can do in this country, at least, is we can continue to try to vote in legislators who will perhaps, hopefully, write something someday as a law that will at least either get rid of it or evaporate 85% of whatever it might be. That's what we have. And in the meantime, continue because we're part of God's kingdom and we have the spirit and we're part of the church. We know that there is hope. even in the midst of such ugly as that, of Christ's return, of people coming to faith, of ministries we support who help young women who are thinking about abortion and come in and talk to them, they can make better decisions. But that is the heartache part of it, is that when you're a part of just this kingdom, rather than we're a part of both, That's what I'm trying to point out here, is that we're making decisions that other people aren't making, but it's unique. This is my kingdom hands, so you know. But yeah, the abortion's a perfect one where you're in agony and at the same time you're hoping. and because of a standard of life that we have as Christians, we don't bomb, we don't tackle, we don't fight, even though you're having to fight those sinful urges if you've ever stood in front of one of those places, or had the ability to counsel someone who's gone through with that and see the wreckage left behind. Yeah, wait, wait, Katrina, you had your hand up a while ago. Randy? So to make the argument, sorry for the extreme, but to make the argument as far as, OK, all of a sudden tomorrow, Ken becomes the king of an island and has his people, and now he's the king. Yes. Right? And so how far do you go with implementing my kingdom, your kingdom, to the biblical law at that point, do you say? Right. Theonomy. If people had the good sense to give me my own nation where I got to make all the rules, I would, I would, because, because I have the benefit I think, of church history and the mistakes I feel many have made, I would make a very provisional government against all forms of premeditated death. I think that that is what would point out any, by the way, there's for a lot of human history, there's a lot of common nations who did the same thing. I wouldn't make the Bible and Christianity the state religion. Because I think that's where everyone has gone wrong. Are you going to address the natural It seems like that plays into this. It does. With the abortion thing, because you don't have to, when you're speaking to somebody about abortion, you don't even have to say, it's not a Christian thing to do. It's not by natural law. We know that taking another life is inherently Unless we claim that we're just animals and it's survival of the fittest, I'm not going to accept that. And then tell that person, by the way, you look like competition to me. So if we don't accept that premise, then we can argue from natural law that abortion is wrong. So you don't even have to have a Christian government in place in order for that to still be considered wrong. Yeah, my point, I totally agree. My point would be that I would keep the church, the church, and keep the government, the government, and say someone gave me my kendum, and I was a minister, and then, but now I got to rule this island, I would step down as a minister of the church. So there's a, I'm sorry, go ahead. I had an outburst. So there's a pre, so the danger is a preoccupation of wanting God's kingdom to be, you know, the secular kingdom. Right. It's that preoccupation of, I won't rest until laws are changed, and when in fact, those laws, we shouldn't expect, I guess, for lack of a better terminology, the secular government to be a Christian government. It's been tried. It's been tried. I mean, it's been tried in the 20th century. I mean, you don't check more of the boxes and everything that we're talking about than Abraham Kuyper did in the Netherlands. He ran as a Christian and ran as Christian. Everything that Randy brought up, that's how we're going to run the country, although it was very liberal in terms of how Conservatives in America, they wanted to give free university. They wanted to give free health care. Like it was kind of this, this was early 20th century. He was a Dutch reformed guy. He won and became prime minister. Has anyone been to the Netherlands? What's the church presence like? What's the Christian life like? Now that happened in the twenties? No. A little bit prior to that. No, that's right. Yeah, in the 20s. And less than 50 years later, all that you know by it is that Amsterdam Free University is still there, which is the university he created. The guy I talk about all the time, Herman Bavink, he ran it after Kuiper died. Now, those are two heavyweights in terms of thinking and philosophy and theology and Christian life and all these things. And there's no view of it at all within a lifetime. And I think that's because, now don't get me wrong, Kuyper and Bavinck would come in here and eat my lunch if they wanted to talk about the two kingdom process, but people have tried it. And I think the church, what we've seen when it gets mixed like that is it's the church that suffers. And it's the church that ceases being this understanding that they're here and we're all here together in God's kingdom and we're pilgrims waiting for that kingdom to fully arrive. And we're pilgrims in this other kingdom that we're doing all of these cultural things with all these other people with. That's where we're sojourning right now, waiting for the completion of this. And while we're doing that, we're supposed to always, when we come on Sunday and we're here in person together, that's not supposed to be just a, oh, this is what I do Sunday, it's the end of the week. Oh, this is a reminder as we take the ordinances, as we watch people be baptized, we hear the word, as we sing, we pray. These are all reminding us of what we're going to do one day in this kingdom all the time. And we need this respite from all that this broken world and our own sinfulness has put on us. and be around other people who are in union and community with Christ. All those things are there for why the church needs to stay the church, because the church is better and greater and more important than. I've heard the analogy of the church as embassy in a country where an embassy is a place where somebody If you're in a foreign land, you can go to that embassy and be around people of your same origin, of your same country, and you're safe. You can go to an embassy and be safe from the outside world, but you still operate. You still go out into that world. You still leave that embassy and then return. So there's that haven of safety, but there's always that sovereignty of the embassy that is for that particular country, right? So if you have a U.S. embassy in Iraq, Iraq isn't sovereign over that U.S. embassy, it's that's... U.S. soil. That is U.S. soil. So you might be going around living your daily life and in Iraq and doing all the cultural things of Iraq, but you go to that place and it's distinct. There's that distinction, but there's still that coexistence and commingling to a certain degree. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah? Josh, you had your hand up a minute. Or did you have something still? I was just going to point out that it seems to me Trying to control via a mandate of people or the world, obviously, it's not going to work. Whereas, on the other hand, changing people from where they want to do it is our purpose. In other words, changing people from where they want to do it. Oh, because they've been changed inwardly, then? Correct. So it's the symptom versus the disease. Because even when Christ rules, there will be unbelievers still. You're talking about like millennial, yeah. I mean, that's hard to battle. It is. So you can't truly mandate people's hearts that are deceptive about all things. Mark? I've lived on this edge, and it's the edge of what Christ has told us to do, go out and evangelize, and to let people choose or become aware of and live our type of life and our morals. And the other side of that is compulsing people to live by our morals. He went back to the woman at the well. He didn't persecute her. He didn't say stone her. He said, don't throw any stones. How can you? And any compulsion on anything that the secular law comes into should not be something that the Christian should back. And I'm extremely radical, and you'll be surprised to hear it from me. But I believe that all drugs should be legalized. I believe it's the responsibility of the people that are using it, not the government. And drugs is the biggest thing. And it doesn't matter what the drug is. Because they made the law, they made it more costly, and they made this whole process that's not controlled to create the whole mess. But it isn't just drugs. Don't throw the stone. And I don't think it's right. I don't agree with it. But that's not my method to try to get someone to stop doing it. Sure. And that's it. Huh? As I've never experienced it. You don't know how radical I am. No. No, not at all. Yeah. So why you're collecting your thought for something, I want to rip off something. I'm going to use the bathroom real quick. Inside joke. When you combine the state and the church, you're right. The church is what ends up being corrupted and damaged. What that looks like, I was trying to remember this. I read this article about Iceland probably a few years ago, and it was a study Folks, I think in their early 20s, like 20, 25, something like that. And it was something like 60% of them identified as Christian. You know, relatively high percentage. They said they were Christian, identified as Christian. What percentage of those people do you believe, believe that God created the heavens and the earth? Zero percent. So 0% of 60% that are supposed to be Christian actually believe in it. And so what happens is you need to redefine what that is. And it just becomes a flawed morality, a works-based thing. And it's unrecognizable of anything you would see in the Bible. And that's what happened. We have that here. Was that? A lot of people claim to be Christians here, that it's a very cultural, they don't believe in half of the core doctrines of faith. Looking here, there's this state of theology every two years, and they publish it in Table Talk, and it's pretty sad. It's haunting. People who claim to be Christian deny basic doctrines. Yeah, that's similar to that study those two psychologists did, I want to say it was six years ago, with high school students who all identified as Christian. And they asked them what their theological beliefs were, basically. And it ended up coming up with a new definition called moralistic therapeutic deism. meaning that only Christian students were asked, high school students, people who came from Christians home, been going to church their whole life, but when they wrote down what they actually believed, it was moralistic, therapeutic deism. They believed God was there, but he was kind of doing other things. It was moralistic in the sense, if I do good, God likes me. If I do good, God's gonna give me stuff. Therapeutic in the means that doing good stuff meant they were gonna get some stuff. That's what they came out of. And when you read the account of the book that they wrote, they were shocked, because they meant to write a book to see what Christian Culture was in the high schools in America and then they found out at the end. It wasn't Christian at all and so I'm piggybacking all the things of how There's there's a an amazing author named David Wells and one of the books is in there unless somebody got it called the courage to be Protestant and he writes a three book series on And he is talking a lot about Christianity and culture, but what he brings up is how modernism went to post-modernism, and post-modernism's hermeneutic is irrationality, and it leads to things that, you know, where everything is subjective. And his whole thing is like, I don't care that the culture's done that. The problem is that the church has integrated all those ideas. The church operates on all those ideas, on irrationality, on individualism, and on all these things, and his whole point is that the culture has seeped so much into evangelicalism that it can't be separated, and he wrote that book 14 years ago. Anyway, Monica. Huh? Okay. I highly doubt it. Good, Katrina. So, You're basically saying, like, church is in one lane and government should be in another lane. Not government. All of culture. All of culture. Yeah. Which is everything that we do. So. Outside of the church. How do they go to church? They only go together by people who are in the church, who are part of God's kingdom. As you work, as you go about your day, everything you're interacting with in the culture around you, what you read, what you watch, all these different things, like you're interacting with culture and the way that you interact with them is different than how people who are not a part of the church interact with them. That's all it is. And as we get into more of it in the coming weeks, it's to bring these hard issues where we've probably all drifted a little ways over here a little too much, especially in politics lately, but also in how we think about education and how we think about work and how we think about different aspects of culture. How is it that we're making sure that our Citizenship in God's kingdom is the driving force about how we interact in the common kingdom. Did I just throw up all over you now? No. So in education, I'm not sure where you're going to go, but I mean obviously education right now is more, is probably as much about your identity, whether it's gender, or self, or... It's a landmine right now. Yeah, so, I mean, how do you... Great question we're gonna ask in week four. You can't say, oh, that's okay, can you? No, no, and that's the distinction. What I wanted to lay out first, you're not saying that everything over here is bad. Everything over here just is. and it's a part of the broken world. So education isn't of itself bad, but what we have to do is say, and again, how much does the Bible write on children's education in the New Testament? How much talk is there about educating children? Okay, there you go so the people that live in God's kingdom are teaching their children Catechesis or just in terms of teaching them the fundamentals of the faith, but when it comes to other aspects of Do you go to school? Do you go to private school? Do you homeschool? What do you about University? What about all these things this person that's living in both kingdoms has a far different way that they answer those questions than the people that are in the common kingdom and So it's not, education isn't bad, neither is work, neither is politics, they just are. They're a part of the common kingdom, they're a part of the culture we're in. How we engage in them, that's where all the big questions that we have to really push ourselves on are. Yeah, I think, Alexi, to you, something goes into the idea of, we lose sight of how much of a celebrity culture we are. Because, No one should be voting for Trump or Biden or Reagan or whoever. It's a platform that, it's a set of ideals, and understanding that those ideals will be having an executive branch, a legislative branch, and of course the judiciary, like that's how our government works, and so we're supposed to look at it in that way. The founders of the Constitution, if you're a fan of American history, they would have never understood the idea of the president being having being like a celebrity, like the superstar Hamilton for himself. But the idea is that all these things like that we're gonna talk about culture is never dismissed. There's no culture in the world that worships celebrity like this one. And, and that's, I mean, you can point to all kinds of things how that's affected the church. Celebrity pastors is a real thing. And, and like, but, but celebrity in terms of mix that with people. being all wound up from lockdown and are losing their jobs or whatever. The news stations irresponsible ramping up of everything nonstop to the boil. And then people start latching on to individuals and the downgrade of intellect in our country because of Twitter. And the idea, like, that's how a leader of a country communicates with people, and then people communicate back. Everyone's dehumanized because of these platforms, and so no one's actually looking at each other as actual people. It's all out there to where it kind of has led to some people to just go, this is the guy without him, the country's going down. So, steering back a little bit to culture and to the church, You gave an example of, you said Abraham Kuyper, who was a Christian, he implemented Christian rules, and it went south. Here's an extreme example. Can you say, then, the worse off the culture, the stronger the church? historicity to that statement. Yeah. I think more persecution from the culture or the, it's almost like, like the purge kind of happening. Like, you know, the nominal Christians that, you know, that, that those people out there, you don't know any of them personally, I don't believe. but would completely fall away because the culture didn't go their way, and God's dead, and I can't operate anymore. So you've now purged from church. Yeah, all the way up to Constantine. I forget the percentage, but the growth of the church up until Constantine is unreal to map. It's like when Paul's writing to Rome, it's something like 2% of the population of the Roman Empire would have identified as Christian. And before Constantine, so that's all persecution essentially or different types. Sometimes it wasn't much, but sometimes it was really bad. And by the time Constantine becomes emperor, it's like 35% of the empire or something like that. And it was in the midst of persecution. And it was after that became easy that it kind of got ugly. And so China right now, the church is growing exponentially. Yeah, Iraq. That's where James Arnold wants to be. He wants to move from France to Iraq because he, the visits he's made there to train pastors is every time he goes back, like, and there's stuff going off in the background. It's like the amount of people that are coming to here is like double, triple, quadruple every time he goes. So I don't know. I mean, it seems that that was something we were promised. And maybe when it's not happening, the church begins to eat itself. And I think that's something else you can see in history, too, if you think about how people how easily people leave churches. Now, it's one thing if doctrine is bad or if you have disqualified leadership. But if you don't like a couple of songs instead of talking, you leave or you know, I mean, there's there's There's great things a church should be doing if they're not facing persecution. Well, and I guess when you look at it like that, and you see the degradation of culture, society, and things, you know, even at my age, you're looking back, and things have progressively gotten worse. Race relations, those types of things have just I mean, it existed, but not as much as it does now. You almost can, you know, thank God for his his remnant that will remain and that will grow. Another enemy is prosperity. Say that. Another enemy is prosperity. I mean, you know, a bigger enemy. Yeah, we this country, you know, has been very prosperous. for a very long time. And so we were very distracted by that. And, you know, I mean, I remember when we were at layoffs at my company several years ago, all of a sudden, my Bible study had really been, you know, and that's, you know, during the Depression, there was revival breaking out everywhere. And so You know, you really don't want to live through that. But hey, if we are persecuted and the economy goes in the tank and China comes in, et cetera, you know what, man, that might be a good thing. You know, from a divine perspective. People would say, don't turn the products over to China, and we pray that that happens. We want that. In any way, shape, or form, because it's worth it. Sammy? I'm just, I agree with what's being said about the church going through persecution, and it's growing, but it seems that, at least from what I see in the world, that's usually only true if that's from the onset. If maybe a country is, Christianity is like a new thing there, and they have continuous persecution, but like here in the United States, I really wonder if, if that persecution becomes a much more real presence, if that's really gonna create growth in the church, especially with, I mean, there's basically, you know, non-existing church discipline, you know, in our church today, in this culture. I don't really know, I just, if you have an example of a country that's maybe, you know, was persecuted for a while, the church was persecuted, but then they just kind of had this lapse of that for a while, and then persecution came back. Did it accelerate again? Yeah, I mean, I think Eric's example of China is probably a good one. In the last just two decades, it was really 10 years ago or so. I mean, it got to the point where people could go to China to teach kids English, and they were allowed to use the Bible to teach them English. And the church had been growing and that kind of thing. They had taken a bit of the pressure off, probably because they saw the benefit of Westerners coming. But then when they changed, I think it was only like two or three years ago, they ramped it up again. The church was growing a lot. It hadn't stagnated. And now I get like newsletters from seminary I went to where they don't have enough people to send for what they're asking in terms of trained leaders. And I know that's a lot of places. So the church is continuing to grow in the midst of children being taken from their parents to be re-educated. So I think China is an example of where it never really came off the gas, but it certainly waned. In the first three centuries of the church, There were some Roman emperors who were very kind to Christians, at least in just ignoring them. And then there were others that were hyperactive in their persecution. And then there were others who, it was in the middle. When they got bored, they'd kill Christians. And that was the thing. They'd blame them for something, or kick them out of Rome, or whatever it might be. So I think there are examples of that happening, yeah. Overseas missionary. OMF, Overseas Missionary Fellowship, I think, used to be China Inland Missions. So up through 1949, they were receptive to missionaries. Maureen Flowers was a dear lady who left China at gunpoint. And so they have had tremendous ups and downs. But the mission still thrives, but it has transformed, too. Well, I'm going to end just because we're over, and I want people to be able to go home. I'm going to read this one excerpt, and next week we'll particularly be talking about Adam. First Adam, and the second Adam. All right. One quick thought. No, no, I said, I said. You mentioned moralistic therapeutic theism a little while ago. If you want to know what your kid's friends believe, what your kid's Baptist friends believe, I think I'll have it. Moralistic Therapeutic Theism and a guy named Michael Horton did an absolutely fantastic presentation on it. It's on YouTube. Okay, I'm gonna read one excerpt from one of the books I'm using to prepare for this and I think this is worded very well what the hope is for engaging this at all. Talking about two kingdoms, I hope to provide encouragement to ordinary Christians. To ordinary Christians who work, study, vote, raise families, help the poor, run businesses, make music, watch movies, ride bikes, play golf, and I engage in all sorts of other cultural activities and who wish to live thoughtful and God-pleasing lives in doing so, I hope this study will be an encouragement for many to take up their many cultural activities with renewed vigor, being convinced that such activities are good and pleasing to God. For many readers, I also hope this book will be liberating, freeing you from well-meaning but non-biblical pressure from other Christians to transform your workplace or to find uniquely Christian ways of doing ordinary tasks. For everyone, I hope that this will serve to focus your hearts on things that are far more important than a promotion at work or the most recent Supreme Court decision. And that is the sufficiency of the work of Christ, the missionary task of the church, and the hope of the new heavens and the new earth. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this night. We thank you for our ability to engage in multiple areas, uh, in the coming weeks to, to really challenge ourselves theologically, uh, of how we, uh, live out our lives in, in thoughtful and considerate ways. and also knowing that enjoying things that you've given us in some of these ordinary tasks. God, may we ever be seeking your face through prayer, through the ministry of your word, through spiritual disciplines, and through our fellowship with each other in the Holy Spirit. We pray a blessing on the people here tonight and on this church. We pray all this in Christ's name. Amen.